Rosemary Hedge

B dug a channel for the plants , plus a drainage channel to take the water away, as this is on one of our few flat bits of the garden and in the ‘rainy’ months the water just stands here on the hard clay, including tons of general building rubble, without running of.
So just to give the rosemary a chance we had to do some serious hard work – B does most of the digging , good thing he actually likes doing it, a bit like mowing, he can spend days walking behind the mower singing away. When the wind is in the right direction our neighbours can tune in and as he has a good voice they rather enjoy it!
We are a pretty good team in this respect, he loves the hard prep work, i do the general design, as far as i ever have one!! en when he has done his job i take over and do all the planting and maintenance.

this is how it had grown last year, very happy with it.
we have odd stacks of logs around the garden , as here, for general wildlife, although the dog reckons they are there for her as it is her hunting ground for lizards!

i have also plantd in a rambler rose in there, single, small white flower, dont know what she is as my neighbours gave me just a cutting of something they had for yonks, but does she ramble, she has already grown right throught the rosemary and will be in flower soon, i will post a photo when she flowers.
this is a super spot with all the early flowers for the bees and the hummingbird hawk moths, which i started to see in feb, they then went back into hibernation but are just appearing again..

Comments

yes stickytoffee, especially when you brush them in walking past, or just pick a bit and squash it under your nose

Terratoonie it is just the bog standard rosemary officionalis, around my village i have seen monsters of nearly 2m high and as wide, and i have also discovered that i can cut straight into the old wood without killing them, as i had always believed, they just seem to come up even stronger.
same goes for the lavenders here

yes i read that too, i believe same goes for sheep on the Hebredian Islands on the scottish west coast , they eat seaweed and and come ready salted! ;) sounds horrible, for them! but then again they have a fabulous life up on the greek hillsides and the islands coastlines.

i have a cple of lavender hedges coming on, discovered lavendula dentata here, mine have been in flower now for about 3 weeks and will continue till first frosts, and the smell is stronger than any of the other lavs i know.

can you grow things like rosemary and lavenders in your humid climate?

Herbs do seem to go mad down here don't they Resi, and in any soils. I was looking at a sage bush the other day about 1 metre high and it had two beautiful swallow-tail butterflies on it enjoying the flowers.

I have been lucky and have grown rosemary very successfully both potted and in the ground - but many local friends have told me they have given up on it - lavender I've not tried - there are a number of lavender farms in Australia which seem to be in much drier climates - you're right about our humidity - it's sub tropical here - not as consistently hot and we as the tropics and we have drier winters and never cold enough for frosts - but our summers are hot and humid and winter sun here is lovely and warm - perfect gardening weather in autumn, winter and spring - in summer it has to fend for it's self - waaaay too hot and sticky except in very early morning for an hour or so

I'm wondering what you have plans for the rest of the land you have?? Exciting to have so much space to fill in =))

yes i didnt really have lavender and rosemary down as humidity loving plants, very shrubby areas is what they love, but wherever we live there are usually so many plants well adapted to that environment to work with, its more a matter of us adapting to them AND trying thingsas plants can be surprisingly adaptable too

oohh Cate, plans galore but only in my head sofar.
it is such a struggle here to get anything established that i have to to thnk very hard wether i really want to do it all and then maintain it, having said that i seem to aquire plants wether i want to or not and then they have to be found homes for and so the matter usually resolves itself, i.e. pickaxe and hammer and off i go.
i can really only do this in the first few months of the year as it is far too hard in the summer, the soil i mean.
i found many very old forged iron tools buried in our previous garden under heaps of other rubbish, the sort which all the farmers around here used to have and work with, many i havent a clue what they are for but i use them for nearly every job i do.
actually i could post some piccies of them, they are really worth looking at.
yes i would like an archway from the house to my veggie plot, covered in climbers, roses. i am thinking of 2 pergolas, at the side and front of the house covered with vines to have shade in summer and sun in winter. another pergola on the top of the garden where we have a 360 view of the hills and the mntns.
and the big project is the eco pool, which at present is still a hole in the ground with about 5 million baby frogs and toads, i love the frogs but they do their dmdest to outnoise the singing of the nightingales at night which is a bit irritating as i so prefer their song!!
that is just a starter.... we can but dream
ps i do garden totally organic and use no 'chemicals' , and since the garden has now been chemicalfree for about 7 years all told, we are now getting orchids popping up all over the place, which is such abonus.
cld have made this into a blog with pictures ;)) sorry i 'll stop now

Wow! Resi... Lucky you...Orchids as weeds! heee hee I LOVE it!!
Your pergola sounds fantastic. and the size of the rosemary and lavendar...do you have any attar roses in your collection to go with the bouquet? The oldest of scent combinations and still the best!
I share the love of the physical work but I'm thankful(since I'm aging) that the soil is sandy and relatively easy to dig. Don't need a huge stone mattock or pickaxe.
Tell B that a great working song...(for cadence while chopping or digging) is O sole Mio! lol.... I often go Disney and break into "Whistle While You Work"...wish I had the seven little helpers though!
One excellent thing the flowers/plants that thrive in your area is their hardiness for your area... Our winters are too long and too severe for the lavenders which you can grow..but I have Hidcote and it weathers the winters quite well. I love the blossom of the spanish lavender. Still looking for that site on the inet that has the profile of the French rose growing industry. someday...hopefully, I'll find it and when I do, I'll be sure to send you the address.

B's working songs are mostly seventies stuff, cannt quite see him doing 'o sole mio' out there ;))

yes i may grumble but we are lucky to live here and have all the advantages which go with the disadvantages, but i am amzazed that you can grow Hidcote, what would be yur lowest winter temps, in C please lol
what do you mean by 'attar roses' though, i only know the term as attar of roses meaning essential oil of roses.

The roses of today (most commonly hybrid tea) have the scent bred right out of them... One of the oldest scents that perfumiers use is attar of rose...yes, the essential oil from the blossom of the old rose. I believe that it was first cultivated in Turkey and the area around the Tigris and Euphrates 4 or 5 thousand years ago...and I think the rose still has the 'attar' in it's botanical name. Will give it a google and see what I can find to substantiate this... I had an var. of Rose called 'Therese Bugnet', it was very thorny and it had the most delicious scent..it perfumed the neighbourhood!. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it if you love the rose scent...it grew very large (almost a tree type) but it is dangerous with thorns, but it had very few pests and didn't require spraying every spring. It is hardy in our zone 5.
As to the Hidcote lavendar I planted it in my last garden and it survived the winters with leaves for cover and insulation under the snow. Every spring it looked dried out and dead and I thought...oh well... but usually by May I would see a flush of new growth...so I started sheering it late in the season and making sure it had it's covers on! Our lowest winter temps were into the minus 20's and 30's C. for 4 - 6 wks. have to check my records as I'm reasonably sure it's Hidcote...might be Munstead.

arent plants funny, you would think lavenders with their leathery thin leaves are custom build for hot/dry climates and yet they survive -30s
do you cut your lavs right down every year? they must get lovely and bushy with all that new growth, do they get enough time for that though in your short season?

i didnt know therese bugnet so i looked her up and she i a hybrid rugosa, she is one of those roses which really appeal to me, although most of mine are the old french roses, simply because i love their forms and their parfums, and i know that they will do well here, many of the english roses tend to underperform in this climate. btw i noticed that the swedish rose society recommended therese for sweden! so i can imagine she does well where you are.
the one on the top of my list at the mo is president de seze http://www.helpmefind.com/gardening/l.php?l=2.31416

a gallica which has come into her own for the first time in my gdn,mm smelly, thorny,1828, sending out suckers, a beauty, howevershe will only have this one flush and no more.
i get my roses (apart fr the odd supermarket impulse buy hehe and cuttings fr friends) from a canadian lady who with her husband have set up a rose nursery near here, specializing in old french roses, they grow them on own rootstock and are exellent without exeption, so far they have all been great successes on my patch. she 'gave' my daughter the roses for her wedding bouquet last year , roses and my own lavender dentata- i was really touched, she is known as the 'roselady' now.
i have never know temps in the -30s, we used to get minus 20s where i grew up but nothing colder, your houses must be so well insulated, cozy but the winters must seem very long and the summers short.

Yes they tended to get bushy, and with every year they seemed to get more woody...I thought them dead several times! We had a few mild winters in a row between 1998 and 2003...and that didn't hurt them. I'm not sure I'll be lucky with them at this site. The zone designation here is 3, whereas in Cornwall it was 5. I'm going to try anyway.
Is your Canadian rose lady from Quebec? If so, she will know all about the terribly cold winters. Count yourself lucky that you live in a more temperate place...our homes are all well insulated and usually have two heating systems...a furnace (central heating) and a fireplace or wood stove (ancillary).
It still feels like winter out there! This has been a non-spring, and yes, our summers do seem short by comparison. but if you think of the year in quarters it really is half year warm to hot and half year cool to cold, and each season is distinct.
The Therese Bugnet will bloom again if thoroughly dead headed after the first flush of bloom. It really is a lovely thing...but those thorns...OMG!!